Wednesday, 24 August 2011

United Serbia (JS) leader Dragan Marković Palma says his party has never called for violence and bloodshed but that they will never support gay Pride Parade.

He has announced that he will ask the Serbian government not to allow holding of the parade because “Serbia has more important things to do”.

This was Marković’s response to Gay-Straight Alliance NGO’s announcement that they will file a lawsuit against him “for homophobia, discrimination and violation of equality”.

In a written statement, the JS leader said that his party would never support something unnatural and something that was not even accepted by the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) and other religious organizations in Serbia”.

He stressed that “homosexuality was considered a disease 20 years ago, not according to Dragan Marković Palma, but according to the World Health Organization, but it was taken off the disease list under pressure from powerful lobbies”.

Marković repeated that his party was advocating a healthy family that included children being born in a marriage between a man and a woman and not to be children in “surrogate families” in which “two persons of the same sex would play mom and dad and only have different hair color. They will wear the same clothes and shave beard and mustache”.

“The JS is fighting against the birth rate decline, helping families and children with various activities because all of us are family people who advocate marriages in which children will not be deprived of possibility to have different-sex parents,” he pointed out, adding that “only this can be a healthy future of Serbia, instead of homosexuality”.

The Jagodina mayor said that the difference between the JS and others was “that we are not ‘hypocrites’ who think one thing and say the other and that we will never say we support the Pride Parade, as gay population calls it, or ‘Shame Parade’ as we call it.”

Bearing in mind that Serbia has better things to do and that now is not the time to shift the entire public’s attention to the “shame parade”, the JS “calls on the government not to allow it to be held in Belgrade”, Marković said in the written statement.

“The Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) believes that taking part in the gay Pride Parade is a personal choice of every individual,“ said SNS Presidency member Zorana Mihajlović.

“Everybody has the right to take part in it or not. That's a personal thing of every citizen of this country,“ she stressed.

The SNS official added that the SNS believed that there were much more serious problems that should be dealt with than the issue of the Pride Parade.

Mihajlović said that it was police’s responsibility to worry about security, including security at the Pride Parade, adding that this was the case in every country.